Shakespeare Magazine 02

Shakespeare & classical music
The original
Shakespearean composer
Shakespeare’s plays are packed with songs,
yet little of the original music survives.
At first the lyrics would have been set to
pre-existing music, but after about 1609
a resident composer was employed by
Shakespeare’s theatre, The Globe. Thomas
Morley and John Wilson might have written
for the Bard, but the only name that can be
proven to have done so is Robert Johnson.
A royal lutenist and composer, Johnson
worked on The Winter’s Tale, probably
Cymbeline, and most notably The Tempest
in 1611.
Teenage prodigy pens
Shakespeare hit
Felix Mendelssohn was just 17 years
old when he wrote his Overture to A
Midsummer Night’s Dream (1826). It
turned out to be one his most famous
and popular pieces, showing off his skill
for painting pictures with notes. The four
magical opening woodwind chords
transport the listener to a fairy realm, where
elfin strings scurry in the woodland. Sixteen
years later the King of Prussia commissioned
him to write incidental music for the rest of
the play.
“Shakespeare, coming upon
me unawares, struck me like a
thunderbolt”
Hector Berlioz
Below left: Hector
Berlioz.
Below: Harriet
Smithson caught his
eye playing Ophelia
on stage; they
married in 1833.
The composer and the
actress
“Shakespeare, coming upon me unawares,
struck me like a thunderbolt,” wrote Hector
Berlioz. The great French composer owed
this revelation to the Irish actress Harriet
Smithson, who in 1827 appeared in Paris as
Ophelia and Juliet. After seeing her act, the
24-year-old Berlioz was instantly smitten.
They married, but love soon turned to hate.
Still, Shakespeare proved a keeper, and Berlioz
wrote a Roméo et Juliette Symphony, and the
opera Béatrice et Bénédict, based on Much
Ado About Nothing.
A year of Shakespeare
Robert Schumann, the quintessential German
Romantic, arguably loved literature as much
as he loved music. In 1852, at the age of 43,
he spent the best part of a year rereading
Shakespeare’s plays, which he’d always loved.
It wasn’t so much for inspiration – in fact
he composed little that year – but to find
passages for a planned anthology of great
authors’ writings about music, to be titled A
Poet’s Garden.
Shakespeare on the shelf
Verdi was in many ways the musical
equivalent of Shakespeare – a master of
dramatic form and human emotion. Though
the Italian composer spoke little English,
and Shakespeare’s plays weren’t often staged
in his native country, that didn’t stop him
loving the Bard above all other playwrights.
He supposedly kept the complete
Shakespeare, in Italian translation, in the
bookcase by his bed. Verdi dabbled with
ideas for several Shakespearean operas and
completed three, all masterpieces: Macbeth,
Otello and Falstaff.
SHAKESPEARE magazine 35